Nearing the end of In Pursuit of Spring, and finding poetry.
As I reached these chapters I understood more fully what it was in In Pursuit that had inspired Robert Frost to recognise the poet in Thomas. The chapters have such visual power that I thought of having no illustrations at all but hadn't quite the courage.
These last chapters show the same conciseness and sensuousness without verbosity that he admires in other modern poets.
For conciseness and wit what better than this about boarding house?
'a clean, new, and unfriendly place that caused a sensation of having slept in linoleum.'
And on a Bridgewater tomb of an Irish soldier:
'He is a fine fellow, albeit of stone, leaning on his elbow and looking at the world...'
And for sensuousness: At Bridgewater: ...'the quay was quiet, and a long greyhound lay stretched out across the roadway, every inch of him content in the warm sun.'
Francisfrith.com copyrightFor visual exactness and freshness:
'So bright was the blossom on the gorse that its branches were shadowy and nearly invisible in the brightness.'
'Nearby, on the other side, was another such hill, which I first took notice of when it was cut in two perpendicularly by the signpost pointing to Spaxton.It was but a blunt, conical hillside of green corn, rosy ploughland, sheep-fed pasture, and a few elms in the partitions; and behind it the dim Quantocks.'
As he reaches Nether Stowey and thinks of Coleridge the honeysuckle begins, not yet in flower but:
cybertramp.com' Honeysuckle ramped on the banks of deep-worn road in such profusion as I had never before seen. The sky had clouded softly , and the sun-warmed misty woods of the coombs, the noise of slender waters threading them, the exuberant young herbage, the pure glowers of stitchwort and the pink and 'silver white' cuckoo flowers, but above all the abounding honeysuckle, produced an effect of wildness and richness, purity and softness, so vivid that the association of Nether Stowey was hardly needed to summon up Coleridge.'
' On the left two converging hillsides framed a wedge of sea, divided into parallel bands of gray and blue.'
And last: 'there massed together the main eminences of Exmoor, of a uniform gray, soft and unmoulded, that was lost from time to time either in the wild, hurrying, and fitfully gleaming sky, or in tawny smoke rolling low down the Quantocks seaward.'
 |
| Marc Thompson - Evening landscape.
As it will be Artweeks in Oxfordshire soon (4th May onwards.) I will show some of Marc's paintings when they fit in.
More details on
|
No poem today because of the poetic prose.
No comments:
Post a Comment